Thursday, August 14, 2014

As the first screens and videos were released of the upcoming EA Sports NHL title, I obviously started to pay attention to the ice graphics to see how realistic they were. Given that the arena's so far have looked amazingly accurate, I imagined that the center ice designs would be equally authentic. It's early on and some photos/videos could be earlier builds but often these early issues end up in final product. It is not my intent to run down EA or their game in this article, but simply bring attention to these inaccuracies so that perhaps they will notice and correct them so that we end up with as many authentic ices as possible. Lets get started.

UPDATE:

Stephen Rowe of EA Sports modeling: Great
review and knowledge. You will be happy to know all the issues you
pointed out have already been addressed. Licensing difficulties limit
the authenticity of some arenas. I'm looking forward to reading your full review once the game is released.

Boston Bruins- Looks great!

Dallas Stars - Looks great!

Detroit Red Wings
So far it is hard to see much but from the screen shot EA released, I cannot see any problems.

Edmonton Oilers
This is a bit odd... The Oilers have no arena name on ice, yet the Rexall Arena logos are under the scoreboard and on the left wall. Last year the arena sponsor, Rexall, got a new logo. My only thought is that the wordmark around center ice is going to change and Rexall requested that they do not put the text in. At any rate, such an authentic arena having no text at center ice is quite a bummer, but lets hope this gets fixed somehow!

Los Angeles Kings- Looks great!

Montreal Canadiens (updated)
The red line has been updated. All this ice needs is the proper Bell Centre font.

New York Rangers - Looks great!

Philadelphia Flyers- Looks great!

Pittsburgh Penguins- Looks great!

San Jose Sharks
Another solid red line where it shouldn't be, but isn't it nice to see an actual arena name on the ice at San Jose? (An EA rep has told us that the red line has since been fixed!)

Saint Louis Blues
Still need to work on the arena wordmark a bit. 'Scottrade' should be in purple and 'Center' in gray.

I will update this page as we see more center ice designs from the game.

Thank you for your response. That is great news and I will be sure to reflect that as I update this post. So far the insane detail to arena accuracy has blown my mind so I am glad that ice details have been looked at as well! Keep up the great work!